Tonight's red post collection includes Camille nerfs and an Elementalist Lux bugfix in a mid-patch update, a new Ask Riot, 2016's Challenger players, a collection of Camille community creations, a new Riot Eng. blog, fan artist feature on Danielle Beaulieu, a reminder to avoid scams this holiday season, and more!

Mid-Patch Update - Camille Nerfs & Elementalist Lux Bugfix

Camille's gotten off to a more dominant start than anticipated, especially in lane where she's bullying opponents a bit too hard and snowballing too quickly off those leads. We're toning down her early game to give opponents a slightly longer window to keep the Steel Shadow down.

Prior to the notes update, Riot Jagtweeted that a small set of Camille nerfs were pushed to live the evening of 12/14:

"Small nerfs to Camille should have just hit now. Base AD down from 62 to 60, and early level Q2 True Damage down."

Ask Riot: Elementalist Lux clarity improvements, keystones, and the future of League

New ASK RIOT is up, this time answering questions on Elementalist Lux, keystyones, and future of LoL:

"Welcome to Ask Riot!

Let’s talk keystones, Elementalist Lux, and the future of League of Legends.

Where do you believe Riot Games and League of Legends will be in 10-15 years?

When Ryze and I founded Riot and started creating League of Legends 10 years ago, we never could’ve imagined where League and Riot would be today. Every day we’re blown away by the community’s deep commitment to the game and to each other. As Rioters, we have had an unrelenting focus on supporting and improving League of Legends, and while this commitment has on occasion led to some criticism about Riot only having one game, we think it’s been incredibly important to build a foundation that will enable Riot to create great games and experiences long into the future.

Answering this question with specificity is a tricky for a couple reasons: First, we’re always exploring numerous game ideas that we think players would love to experience 5+ years down the road, but we’re not ready to talk about any of these projects just yet. Secondly, and more importantly, we chart our course as a company a little differently from others. We aren’t driven by external “business goals” such as “ship x games in 5 years” or “go hit X in revenue by 2020.” Instead, we’re guided by a relentless pursuit of creating meaningful experiences that will resonate with serious gamers and that we think players want to see.

Ideas are the easy part—everyone has great game ideas that would likely be fun if they could become a reality—the really hard part is actually building an incredible product and executing on the idea sufficiently to ensure the experience actually matches the potential that the initial idea promised. League MMO where?! League movie, where?! Those ideas are beautiful when they are in all of our heads, but realizing the full potential of ideas like those is what is really difficult to do.

So what does that mean for the future of League and for Riot? We do know a few things for certain. We’ll continue to evolve League of Legends as a holistic experience—we’ll keep improving the competitive side of the game while continuing to enrich the universe around the game. We’ll continue to evolve and improve the League Esports ecosystem to try to ensure League remains a global sport that lasts for generations. Beyond League, we aspire to deliver a handful of other games that we hope players love. Just like with League of Legends, we’re less concerned about mass market appeal and are more interested in deeply serving the audience the game is trying to delight.

As a company we’re dedicated to constantly raising the bar on the games, content, and service that we deliver, so as we learn and grow, we aspire to continue to improve across every dimension. While we work towards Riot’s future, one thing that will never change is who these experiences are made for: passionate gamers who make games in general a meaningful part of their lives. The passion and love within the League community is the reason League and Riot exist today, so we hope to live up to everyone’s expectations in the future as we bring new experiences to bear.

As a gamer and a Rioter I’m hopeful and excited to see how players and games in general continue to impact the world. There is going to be a lot of exciting change happening within gaming over the next couple decades, and we hope to find new ways to delight and connect with gamers all over the world as gaming continues to play a bigger and bigger role on the world stage.

TRYNDAMERE, Co-Founder, Riot Games

Are you aware of the problems with the new Elementalist Lux skin? It’s hard to read some spells, and some of the VFX from different forms closely resemble spells from other champions.

We’re getting this feedback from a few different places, and it’s been really helpful in validating some clarity issues we’ve been identifying on our end. The team has been super close to this skin for a long time and it took getting it into players’ hands to see a lot of what you’re calling out. We’re working on some changes that we hope to roll out in one of the earlier patches next year. While I don’t have the full set of details at this time, I do know we will be prioritizing the issue with her Q particle fading at the end of its path before the ability actually ends.

SUPERCAKES, Product Manager, Personalization

Were keystones a rushed idea? There’s no HUD visibility for spectators, for example, and several champions came out of nowhere into the meta because they weren’t adjusted with the new keystones in mind.

So, a few different things I can say on this subject. This could get long, so I’ll try bullets:

We think masteries needed some help as a feature and we still do. Keystones was a first attempt to make the choices a little more meaningful and impactful.

We’re not sure how much of the info needs to be visible to other players or as part of spectator. What I mean is that if we have two summoner spells and one keystone, then showing three icons isn’t too bad. But what if we decided to try four keystones? Do we need to show all of that info? Does it get overwhelming?

In projects like this, you frequently find that technically 50% of the work is almost trivial to implement, and 50% of the work is an uphill climb in the snow. We do try to make sure features are in reasonable shape before releasing them, but we also try to be mindful of diminishing returns. If spectator support had taken two more months, does it make sense to hold the feature for two more months when we’re not even sure players will really like it?

The same holds true of champion balance. We could go through and rebalance every champion (a monumental task) but that could totally be throw-away work if the keystone feature ended up being poorly received by players and needed a lot more work or even scrapped. Instead, we tried to hit the outliers and champs we suspected would be a problem. Then we adjusted others over time as they showed up. This is pretty much the way we operate all of the time. We’d never be able to ship anything (including other balance changes) if we had to make a comprehensive pass at the entire game whenever we made changes. We definitely make a pass, but we don’t catch everything.

All of that said, the mastery code ended up being even more brittle than we thought. We know “League spaghetti code” is an old meme, and to give our engineers credit, they have really replaced and repaired almost all of the nasty older code that was added quickly when League was growing faster than the team could keep up. I say “almost all” because Masteries proved to be an unfortunate exception. While our intent was to add a lot more follow-up than we did in the patches post launch, we ended up causing a lot of bugs whenever we did so. Again keeping the idea of diminishing returns in mind, it made us more reluctant to keep tweaking things that weren’t a crisis. This preseason, where we had more bandwidth to catch bugs or other problems, we made a larger pass at masteries. I think we improved the system overall, but it still has a long way to go, and the current keystones (both the individual content and the system as a whole) isn’t the final one.

GHOSTCRAWLER, Game Design Director

Have a question? Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Dos and Don’ts, then ask away.

We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about."

L4T3NCY with RGM + LCU brain dump

With Legend of the Poro King up for the next few weeks in RGMQ as part of Snowdown, here's L4T3NCY with a brain dump style update sharing thoughts on rotating game mode queue and the LCU:

"TL;DR: We have the first two Rotating Game Modes (RGM) working in League Client Update (LCU) for 6.24, although we're still in beta and it's a little rough! We're going to continue the current RGM cadence of one game mode per patch while we focus on getting more modes LCU-ready and make new stuff for 2017 like the Doom Bots and Winter Summoner's Rift we just did.

Heya guys, thought I'd do one more of these before the end of the year to give you an idea of what's coming up for RGM and LCU in 2017. :D I want to keep doing these as regularly as possible (assuming there's something worth talking about) to keep you guys up to date on what we're thinking and the direction we're heading in.

As of 6.24 we'll finally have the first few RGM modes available in LCU. Yaaay! \^o^/ LCU is still in beta though, and the RGM modes will be a bit bumpy to get started, so apologies in advance for some missing backgrounds, generic text, etc. We made a choice though to try and get RGM modes out to you guys as soon as possible in LCU (even if they're a bit janky) rather than make everyone wait extra months just so a menu somewhere could be perfect. It'll look like this to start:

You may have also noticed we've slowed down the cadence on releasing new game modes. As of 6.21 we started doubling up modes in each patch. This is partly due to us working to get each mode stood up in LCU, but it's also because we've been focusing on future game modes and cool stuff for 2017. Some examples of that are the recent Doom Bots mode we did, and the upcoming new Legend of the Poro King mode and Winter Summoner's Rift map! We're working on even more stuff like this for next year, so in the meantime, we're probably going to continue the one mode per patch cadence.

Personally I'm pretty excited to get all our stuff working in the new client. Once we're done it'll give us the freedom to do even cooler stuff than we could in the AIR client. It's just gonna take some time as we work through it.

Thanks for your continued patience and support! I'll be chilling in here today, so feel free to prod me with any questions. ^_^b

-- L4T3NCY"

Announcing the 2016 Challengers

Challenger players from the 2016 season have been posted! The regional posts include a list of all 300 challenger players and the top 5 ranked 3v3 and 5v5 teams as well as a small FAQ on the exclusive reward Challenger jacket.

"Challenger is the pinnacle of Ranked play, so let’s take a moment to congratulate the top of the 2016 ladder in NA. This year’s top players and teams lay claim to not only Victorious Maokai and prestigious borders, but also an exclusive Challenger jacket. The top ten players, and the top team for each queue score the even rarer Challenger medallion on top of the jacket."

Monthly Ghostcrawler Q&A - December

Ghostcrawler returned to the LoL Twitch channel Wednesday for the December Monthly Q&A screen - Check out the VOD for discussion on all sorts of player questions, ranging from balance to reworks and more!

2017 EU & NA LCS Changes

LoL Esports has published two articles on the upcoming start of the 2017 LCS season - a lengthy article detailing extensive format changes for the EU LCS and a few changes headed our way for the NA LCS in 2017.

Fan Artist Feature: Danielle Beaulieu

"Today we’re speaking with Danielle Beaulieu, a community artist who’s been cosplaying for over ten years now. She’s worked on more than fifteen League costumes, and her most recent is Elementalist Lux (Storm)!

Learn more about her creation process, inspirations, and favorite project below!

I started about 4 years ago when I needed a costume for PAX East. I knew Riot would have a booth there since it's a Video Game convention in Boston which is local to me. I didn't really know how to make armor or anything back then so I picked Zyra since I thought I could easily just glue leaves to myself, plus she was pretty new at the time. It worked! But it definitely sparked my interest in learning new skills, and being able to create better costumes for the next convention because some of the other cosplayers I met for the first time there such as Missyeru in her Leona cosplay or Britthebadger in her Janna were so intricately and beautifully made. I really wanted to do better!

Elementalist Lux (storm version) was definitely my favorite to work on challenge-wise since I had no idea how to make so many of the pieces and I only had a little over 2 weeks to get it all done. It was the biggest challenge yet. I learned a lot of useful skills from that project. Arcade Hecarim was probably the most rewarding costume out of all of the projects I worked on just because of how happy it made everyone.

My creative process usually starts in my head for weeks, sometimes months building it over and over in my head. Then I always start with the parts I am stumped on, I call it "swallowing the frog" because once those areas are out of the way, you have a really good idea on how you're doing everything else after and it goes much more smoothly. Plus having an end in sight for a project helps me not procrastinate as much. I make little schedules for myself like "Monday-Make the bracers, Tuesday-Sew the skirt, Wednesday-Prime and Paint" and try to follow it so I finish everything I start.

Do you have any favorite League content creators or artists that inspire you?

Kohalu and Missyeru are two cosplayers I used to look at a lot when I'd search "League of Legends cosplay" on Google images when I first started getting into this whole thing. This was way before cosplay in social media was this popular and available. I am pretty sure without them I wouldn't have even had any clue as to where to start. It's funny because I am good friends with both of them now, surely I wouldn't have gotten the chance to meet them if it weren't for League cosplay!

I also met some local League cosplay artists, Bonnie's Cosplay and Pizoobie who are just so talented it really pushed me to make sure my costumes were always on par with theirs, I would not be this motivated to cosplay if it weren't for them especially when I first started. I learned pretty much all my basic skills just from watching them make their costumes and went from gluing leaves to underwear pretending to be Zyra, to making a fully lit up, rideable, Arcade Hecarim cosplay in just about a year of learning.

I owe Riot everything because I would not be where I am today as a cosplayer or artist without their characters. I don't think I would have been so interested in learning armor or prop making if it wasn't to participate in the events they hold for cosplayers at PAX East. I will be doing tons more League of Legends cosplays in 2017, I am actually working on the next one right now!

Quick Hits: El. Lux in 30 Mb, 2016 ASE Trophies, Scams, & more

[Quick hits is our own mini news collection inside a red post collection, often including shorter or easy to digest stories and repeat information you may have missed in other posts!]

Check out the new Riot Games Engineering Elementalist Lux: 10 Skins in 30 MegaBytesarticle for a look at the technical side of getting Elementalist Lux and all of her skin swapping features into League of Legends!

REMINDERS

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

Snowdown 2016is here! Through January 9th, a ton of content and deals are available - new legacy skins for Braum, Graves, & Karma, Winter Summoner's Rift, over 100 returning legacy skins, a ton of new summoner icons, LotPK, new chests, and more! Click here for previews.

Camille & PROGRAM Camille release bundle available for 1837 for the first few days following her release. More info on Camille available [here].